I may never be a great live player

I don't think that I will ever play as well live as I do online, mainly because of my learning style and (dis)abilities.

If I read a post in the Poker Theory section of the twoplustwo.com poker forums, I get it right away. It doesn't matter that the person posting has a Ph.D. in math and plays poker at higher levels than I will ever see.  I understand comcepts, theory, and big-picture issues quickly and easily, whether it's poker, foreign policy, economics, or anything else.  My brain works like that.

However, I am very slow to memorize or nail down small details.  When I took a collge Spanish course, I understood the rules and flow of Spanish grammar so easily, and spoke the languange so well, that my classmates assumed I was getting an "A" in the course.  What my classmates didn't know was that I was having trouble with tests because I couldn't memorize the vocabularly as fast as it came as me.

I would get a B or C on a test because I couldn't name all of the things "alrededor la casa" (around the house).  I couldn't remember the Spanish words for things like wall, ceiling, or couch, then we were on to another topic, like supermarket words, and I could never quite keep up.   My brain works like that.

So, in my bit-by-bit plodding learning style, working on one piece of live tournament mechanics at a time, it would probably take me 2,000 hands to get comfortable with keeping track of the pot size, and able to think about something else at the same time.  Then it would take another 2,000 hands to watch for live tells (memorizing the tells from Caro's Book of Poker Tells) while learning how to watch and read 1 or 2 players, then more--you get the idea.

I would guess that at the local charity rooms where I play I see about one tournament hand a minute, which is about 50 hands an hour given that there are 10-minute breaks between levels.  Online, I can play a lot more hands, and I can try things and learn things much more quickly.

Online is roughly 2 hands per minute, but since a lot of my play is STTs , I"m often playing at short tables, in fact, in my last STT I was heads-up for about 20 minutes.  So an estimate of 3 hands per minute isn't out of line.

In other words, I play 3 times as many hands per hour online versus live.  But that's not all.  I can theoretically go to a local live tournament 5 nights a week, but I go much less often than that for several reasons, including the bad structures of some of those tournaments.  Plus, online STTs are available any time, 24/7.  Since I can play online whenever I want* the maximum number of hands I play online vs. live is probablysomewhere between 5:1 and 10:1--and that's without multitabling online.

Given all that, plus the fact that I have almost no memory of previous hands (and can't use Holdem Manager at a live table), I will probably never progress any further than being one of the better local players in my city, which, given the small sample size of my live play, might not even make me a winning player.

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*Theoretically I can play online whenever I want, but since Black Friday there aren't any sites with good traffic.  On the site where I play, at offpeak hours I might open an STT and wait 30 minutes for it to fill up.  When that happens, I study or do admin work while I wait for the STT to start.